Nirvana, Gone
by Araclyzm
Summary: Some say love is a river that flows over gentle reed. Some say love is a razor that cuts you till you bleed. Some say love is hunger, and they are in constant need...


Nirvana, Gone

_Some say love is a river that flows over gentle reed._

_Some say love is a razor that cuts you till you bleed._

_Some say love is hunger_

_And they are in constant need..._

Araclyzm 

"Never again."

"This place is screwed." 

Yuffie didn't leap and pivot at the abruptness of the message, nor at the way it seemed to lacerate the very air from which the speaker had spoken. Perhaps if the identity of the speaker was unmistakably indefinite and the notion one received of the said speaker indubitably yelled lucid hatred, then maybe she would have. After all, Yuffie, though already nineteen years of age, was a far cry from being described as 'calm', and would undoubtedly have flung herself off the railing of the balcony if it were anyone else but the very same person she was about to glare at for ruining her concentration.

Yuffie didn't even glance away from the picture before her as she shoved the yellow pencil, half its original size with the eraser noticeably bitten, behind her left ear and snapped the notebook that had been open in the crook of her right arm shut. It was then she chose to straighten herself, brushing her apparel – a longish tee and shorts – with a free hand as she pushed away from the barrier that was meant to keep people from falling off inadvertently. 

Waving her hand at the sight she had been staring at before being interrupted, she at last chanced a momentary look over her shoulder. 

"What's so bad about it, Squall? I see nothing wrong with it," she said, meaning for her words to be soft and evocative, only to have them come out as squeaky and curiously childish. If Squall noticed her tone, he didn't say anything about it, instead choosing to take in the same landscape Yuffie seemed so rapt with. 

The grounds of the Bastion were dead. There was no life. Perhaps that of the few plants and trees thriving, yes, but with that exception, there was naught more. There was no splendor where there was no life. The Falls north of the castle fell to the sky, crystallized and unyielding in icebergs and rocks that served as their tears. Frozen…that was how he portrayed the Bastion. It was a place of paltry loveliness, jammed in a remote corner of time, forgotten and stuck, for lack of a better word. It was a place where no alterations could transpire or come forward, for if they did, the very equilibrium of time would crumble and collapse, and the Bastion would fall into an abyss. 

The Bastion could deviate into nothing, for all Squall truly cared. He was but twenty-five and in his eyes, the only thing left to live for was life itself – if he was to live, it was because he wanted to, and if he wanted to, then that's all he would fight for. To live. That was all that was left. 

Yuffie knew this; everyone who knew Squall was well aware of this fact. They said he cared for nothing but himself. Not as in impressionable egocentricity, though, more as in he literally did not care about another, and did not want to. Squall himself knew this wasn't true, but didn't bother enough to make them all believe he was more than just 'full of himself', as Cid occasionally said. 

Yuffie let out a breath, her opal gaze floating silently from the vista below the terrace to the only other occupant at that moment. 

He ran a frayed glove through his long mane of hair. With each knot his hand snagged, he winced the slightest, and Yuffie winced with him, just as invisibly, already having her own experiences with knots and long hair to reminisce on. Her hands twitched where they rested, her right arm and sketchbook settled on the paling, left hand on her right. She wanted to help him pull the knots out of his hair. She didn't want him to feel that pain. He'd felt enough. But years of instruction as not only a ninja but as an acquaintance of the said Squall Leonhart kept her hands where they were. 

She noticed he didn't correct her when she used his name. Squall preferred to be called 'Leon' for some reason Yuffie couldn't quite grasp. She still saw no real reason that he should not want Squall to be what he was known as; it was a perfectly fine name. She could, however, see that the name change was associated with something of his past – oh what a clichéd web we weave – and that of which he did not want to remember. 

But Yuffie wanted so badly to help him forget. She wanted to help him forget all his problems, all his fears, all his ghosts, even if that included her. All she really wanted in life was to make him smile. She lived for that smile – never at her, never at someone else, but incontestably there, somewhere, the rarity of seeing it like that of witnessing the birth of a phoenix. She wanted to comb out his evils and tribulations with her hands and her words and her eyes and her smiles. She wanted to make him happy. 

Though, Yuffie had to admit, even if the only time she could ever touch him was when they trained and she managed to hit him somehow, she had a semi-good deal here. She could gaze at him all she wanted, whether in her dreams or in her thoughts or in her drawings. She was always seeing him when she shut her eyes, and didn't even have to summon the power to conjure him when she wanted to. She just said his name and he was there. Always.

"There's plenty wrong with it," said the voice of Squall, though it did seem the real Squall was not in the conversation at all. "I don't know what you see in it. It's no different than it ever was, before or after we left, before or after we came back. There's nothing beautiful about it." 

"I didn't say it was beautiful, Squall," Yuffie responded, brushing her long black bangs from her face, "I only said that there was nothing wrong with it."

"Besides the fact that it's wedged between two worlds?" 

"What's that supposed to mean?" Yuffie inquired, leaning forward to hear his answer. The roar of the Rising Falls, though originating from many meters away, began to sound awfully strident within the quiet that had fallen between the two. Yuffie hated the silence when she was with someone else – if she was by herself, she wasn't exceptionally concerned, which was an oddity that no one minded nor questioned – and the synchronization of the Rising Falls now pierced her eardrums. 

Squall didn't move for another moment, and Yuffie became progressively more uncomfortable. She began to think he had forgotten she was even present, let alone that they were having a, for once, civil conversation teetering on the edge of a disagreement. 

Thankfully, Squall did not forget she was there, nor did the fact slip his mind that she had made a very innocent query. 

His perpetually blue eyes shut, and Yuffie bit her tongue unobtrusively to keep from entreating him to open them. "The Bastion, Yuffie," he told her inaudibly, with a velveteen softness to his tone, "will always be the same. How is nothing wrong with that?" 

Yuffie's eyes enlarged. "But I thought you hated change? A place where no bad can happen, a place where no good can happen – a place where life will stay the way it always was – isn't that what you want?"

The lids hiding his unreservedly cerulean eyes opened with a single flash and the nineteen-year-old Yuffie found her own eyes immersed in his, neither of them doing a thing to stop it. 

"I never said that's what I wanted." He waited, body inert, to see what she would say. 

Instead of answering him, however, the raven-haired female found her mentality drifting into thoughts of those eyes. There was only one way to portray them, in her very own words: they were infinite fields, fields that held monsters and spirits and memories of times in his life, whether good or bad. They were forever-never-ending oceans that fell into the very depths of the world, and beyond, holding beings he reviled, angels he didn't, and the pain both caused to his existence. They were heartbreakingly blank blue skies that were cloudy and gray even though they didn't show – those clouds hid the sun, the gray overtaking it's shining glow. They were arctic worlds, freezing and undeniably there, too cold to go unnoticed. They were _his_ eyes – she thought that said it all.

Yuffie didn't know why, but she was just fascinated with his façade, and the role he played not only in his own life, but also in her own and everyone else's. He was very composed most of the time, and it was almost as if nothing could ever disconcert him. He was astonishingly vindictive to most everyone. Perhaps he's kind to Aerith; maybe he's at peace with Cloud. He couldn't be bothered with Cid, and the feeling was mutual. Yuffie, however, was a thorn in his side. She was the pebble in his shoe, the crick in his neck. The pain in the ass that just wouldn't leave him be – the ache that loved him too much to disappear. He hurt her in every movement and remark for one reason or another, but still Yuffie clung to her beliefs that someday he might change.  

And maybe that day was coming closer. 

"Then what _do _you want?" she asked quietly, her tone layered with its habitual squeaky sweetness. 

Squall stepped toward her, raising a hand as though to strike her. Surprised to see her wince, his left eyebrow rose a centimeter, and, knowing what she thought he was about to do, he rested his hand on her downy shoulder. 

"I don't know yet," was his murmur towards her. Forcing herself to bring her eyes away from his, Yuffie hesitantly leaned her head toward his hand, holding an unmistakable desire to drop dead then and there, and closed her opal orbs, focusing all attention on the warmth of his gloved hand on her shoulder. She thought it couldn't get any better than that with him, and she savored the minute of ecstasy, knowing full well that as soon as Squall regained his senses, he'd pull away and yell at her. 

So she was completely shocked when his hand cupped the side of her face. Her eyes flickered open to find her twenty-five-year-old companion standing barely three inches from her, his eyes searching. 

"Don't know," she whispered, "Or won't tell me?" 

Squall didn't reply, instead guiding her towards him with just his hand. A feathery gentleness touched Yuffie's lips and it was all she could do not to whoop for God-given joy. She could feel herself slipping away from reality and slipping into a place she'd only been in her childhood dreams. 

_There's nothing I wouldn't tell you, Yuffie._

**[E.n.d]**


End file.
